Communities Turn to RFID to Boost Recycling

In Howard County, Wilcom says, general participation in the recycling program has increased since the county began providing tagged carts. He declines, however, to comment on whether the RFID tags played a role in that increase, or whether it was simply the convenience of the new carts. "People love the carts," he states.

Howard County typically places an Alien Squiggle EPC Gen 2 RFID label on the inside lip at the top of the cart, where it is less likely to be damaged by wear and tear, as well as weather. At the beginning of the day, the recycling truck driver first turns on the reader, located in the vehicle's hopper, then begins his route. Upon stopping at a pickup location, an employee gets out of the truck and attaches the cart to a mechanical arm that lifts the container above the hopper, where the interrogator reads the container's RFID tag and transmits that data to the truck's computer. There is no GPS or GPRS system in use, however. When the truck returns to its depot at the end of its route, county employees utilize a USB memory stick to download data into the county's back-end system.

"The biggest thing we've learned is the need for full automation [of the RFID system]," Wilcom says. With full automation, the reader would awaken and begin receiving RFID transmissions as soon as the truck ignition was started. Currently, he notes, if drivers forget to turn on the system, that day's data is never captured. "They've been pretty good about remembering, but there is that potential for human error," Wilcom states. In all other ways, he adds, the system has worked effectively. Now that the county is assured the system functions well, it plans to begin mailing reminder cards in September to those residents identified as not recycling.

"We wanted to use RFID to track participation rates," Wilcom says. "Since the carts are assigned to specific addresses, we can then send a postcard if we find someone is not recycling."

RecycleBank offers an RFID-based solution that is similar to Concept2's but also tracks the weight of recycling from each pickup. In that way, users can receive coupons or other incentives if they recycle a specific quantity (see RFID Helps Reward Consumers for Recycling). The county is more interested in tracking the bulk rate of recycling by measuring the weight of the truck's contents when it returns from its route, Wilcom says, rather than by weighing the contents of each individual household's recycling bin.